Bangladesh has become a lower-middle income country with the Gross National Income per capita (GNI), joining those with annual incomes of $1,046 to $4,125.

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The World Bank in a posting on its website says it revises the income classification of the world's economies every year on July 1 through calculation using the World Bank Atlas method.

The new World Bank figures show that Malawi has the world’s lowest reported GNI per capita at $250, while Monaco has the highest, at more than $100,000.

The global lender said, “People living in low-income countries continue to fall behind those in the upper per capita GNI brackets, while they earn and consume significantly less than much of the world’s population.”

Its Chief Economist and Senior Vice President Kaushik Basu said, “It is heartening to see that over the last one year itself four nations crossed over that critical line from the low-income to the lower-middle income category.”

The three other countries to improve their positions from low-income category to lower-middle income this year are Kenya, Myanmar, and Tajikistan.

According to data released by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) on May 14, the per capita income in Bangladesh rose from $1,190 to $1,314.

The figure emerged from an analysis of data pertaining to the first nine months (July-March) of the 2014-15 financial year.